Sunday, November 3, 2013

The Pley Club

(Reuters) - The U.S. Secret Service said on Friday it is under investigation by the Department of Homeland Security over the loss of computer files on the Washington Metro system.

In 2008, a contract employee lost two computer tapes on the Metro while transporting them from one facility to another, Secret Service spokesman Edwin Donovan said. The investigation was first reported Friday morning by Fox News.

The Secret Service notified transit police and the Department of Homeland Security, but were unable to locate the tapes. The back up tapes were not marked or identified and were protected by many layers of security, Donovan said.

"It was a low risk for compromise," Donovan said.

Following the incident, the Secret Service put in place new procedures aimed at preventing a repeat.

"There has been no reported fraud associated with the loss of these tapes," Donovan said.

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Secret Service is under scrutiny after about a dozen employees were accused of misconduct for bringing women, some of them prostitutes, back to their hotel rooms ahead of a visit by President Barack Obama to Cartagena, Colombia.

The United States is isolated from Latin American leaders calling for drug reform.MORE »

Though sidelined by the Secret Service scandal, last month’s Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, was an event of considerable significance. There are three major reasons: Cuba, the drug war and the isolation of the United States.

A headline in the Jamaica Observer read, “Summit shows how much Yanqui influence had waned.” The story reports that “the big items on the agenda were the lucrative and destructive drug trade and how the countries of the entire region could meet while excluding one country–Cuba.”

The meetings ended with no agreement because of U.S. opposition on those items–a drug-decriminalization policy and the Cuba ban. Continued U.S. obstructionism may well lead to the displacement of the Organization of American States by the newly-formed Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, from which the United States and Canada are excluded.

Cuba had agreed not to attend the summit because otherwise Washington would have boycotted it. But the meetings made clear that U.S. intransigence would not be long tolerated. The U.S. and Canada were alone in barring Cuban participation, on grounds of Cuba’s violations of democratic principles and human rights.

Latin Americans can evaluate these charges from ample experience. They are familiar with the U.S. record on human rights. Cuba especially has suffered from U.S. terrorist attacks and economic strangulation as punishment for its independence – its “successful defiance” of U.S. policies tracing back to the Monroe Doctrine.

Latin Americans don’t have to read U.S. scholarship to recognize that Washington supports democracy if, and only if, it conforms to strategic and economic objectives, and even when it does, favors “limited, top-down forms of democratic change that did not risk upsetting the traditional structures of power with which the United States has long been allied–[in] quite undemocratic societies,” as neo-Reaganite scholar Thomas Carothers points out.

At the Cartagena summit, the drug war became a key issue at the initiative of newly-elected Guatemalan President Gen. Perez Molina, whom no one would mistake for a soft-hearted liberal. He was joined by the summit host, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, and by others.

The concern is nothing new. Three years ago the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy published a report on the drug war by ex-Presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico, and Cesar Gaviria of Colombia calling for decriminalizing marijuana and treating drug use as a public-health problem.

Much research, including a widely quoted Rand Corporation study of 1994, has shown that prevention and treatment are considerably more cost-effective than the coercive measures that receive the bulk of funding. Such nonpunitive measures are also of course far more humane.

Experience conforms to these conclusions. By far the most lethal substance is tobacco, which also kills nonusers at a high rate (passive smoking). Usage has sharply declined among more educated sectors, not by criminalization but as a result of lifestyle changes.

One country, Portugal, decriminalized all drugs in 2001–meaning that they remain technically illegal but are considered administrative violations, removed from the criminal domain. A Cato Institute study by Glenn Greenwald found the results to be “a resounding success. Within this success lie self-evident lessons that should guide drug policy debates around the world.”

In dramatic contrast, the coercive procedures of the 40-year U.S. drug war have had virtually no effect on use or price of drugs in the United States, while creating havoc through the continent. The problem is primarily in the United States: both demand (for drugs) and supply (of arms). Latin Americans are the immediate victims, suffering appalling levels of violence and corruption, with addiction spreading through the transit routes.

When policies are pursued for many years with unremitting dedication though they are known to fail in terms of proclaimed objectives, and alternatives that are likely to be far more effective are systematically ignored, questions naturally arise about motives. One rational procedure is to explore predictable consequences. These have never been obscure.

In Colombia, the drug war has been a thin cover for counterinsurgency. Fumigation–a form of chemical warfare–has destroyed crops and rich biodiversity, and contributes to driving millions of poor peasants into urban slums, opening vast territories for mining, agribusiness, ranches and other benefits to the powerful.
Other drug-war beneficiaries are banks laundering massive amounts of money. In Mexico, the major drug cartels are involved in 80 percent of the productive sectors of the economy, according to academic researchers. Similar developments are occurring elsewhere.

In the U.S., the primary victims have been African-American males, increasingly also women and Hispanics–in short, those rendered superfluous by the economic changes instituted in the 1970s, shifting the economy toward financialization and offshoring of production.

Thanks largely to the highly selective drug war, minorities are dispatched to prison – the major factor in the radical rise of incarceration since the 1980s that has become an international scandal. The process resembles “social cleansing” in U.S. client states in Latin America, which gets rid of “undesirables.”
The isolation of the U.S. at Cartagena carries forward other turning-point developments of the past decade, as Latin America has at last begun to extricate itself from the control of the great powers, and even to address its shocking internal problems.

Latin America has long had a tradition of liberal jurisprudence and rebellion against imposed authority. The New Deal drew from that tradition. Latin Americans may yet again inspire progress in human rights in the United States.

ABC News' Reena Ninan, Christine Romo and Mary Bruce Report:

CARTAGENA, Colombia - ABC News has learned exclusively that the Secret Service officials accused of misconduct in Colombia revealed their identities by boasting at a Cartagena brothel that they worked for President Obama.

Partying at the "Pley Club" Wednesday night, eleven members of the president's advance team allegedly bragged "we work for Obama" and "we're here to protect him."

The officials spent the night throwing back expensive whiskey and enlisting the services of the club's prostitutes, according to a bouncer at the club and a police source.

Sources tell ABC News several of the men agreed to pay for, and received, services from the "highest category" prostitutes available at the club, who charge upwards of $200.

The men paid for the sexual services in advance but when it came time to settle the bill, there was a dispute over the charges.

The group became belligerent and the police were called. The argument between the officials and the bouncers from the club escalated and ultimately spilled onto the street, according to several eye witness accounts.

The police have since been directed by U.S. authorities not to comment on that night or the scandal surrounding the Secret Service, according to a senior police official in Cartagena.

Prostitution is legal in Colombia and the women who work at the Pley Club live on the premises.

The club, located on a dusty street in the industrial Bosque neighborhood, just blocks from the port, has a rough exterior but boasts plush "pley rooms" inside.

The Pley Club is a well-known brothel in this historic city. Some taxi drivers in the resort-town are paid a commission for recommending the club and its prostitutes to tourists.

The officials were in Cartagena on assignment ahead of the president's visit for the Summit of the Americas last weekend.

The controversy surrounding the officials' misconduct, however, overshadowed the summit last week and local residents are questioning why the city put so many resources into the international event only to be left with a tarnished reputation.

"Cartagena didn't benefit one cent from President Obama's visit. All people remember are that the Secret Service agents slept with our prostitutes," said a man who works in the neighborhood.

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